Use of synthetic polymer hydrogels to prepare scaffoldless 3D tissue constructs

Gerson Florez,Eric Williams,Solomon Samuel,Minn H Saing,Jasvir S Khurana

doi:10.12688/f1000research.2-18.v1

Gerson Florez, Eric Williams + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.2-18.v1

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Abstract

The use of 3-dimensional tissue cultures is gaining popularity in many fields including drug discovery, toxicity testing and tissue engineering. Currently most of the techniques used to prepare these 3D tissues are time consuming and cannot be reproduced easily. There is an urgent need to optimize the preparation of these 3D tissue cultures. This study evaluated the use of synthetic hydrogel polymers used to manufacture soft contact lenses to guide cells to form multicellular tissue-like structures. It was found that bovine chondrocytes and porcine dental pulp stem cells were able to form 3D tissue structures when placed inside a soft contact lens. Commercially available microarrays, 96 or 384 well plates manufactured using synthetic hydrogel polymers may help overcome many reproducibility issues and simplify the 3D tissue culture process.

Highlights

Three dimensional tissue cultures are gaining popularity because they mimic the natural cell environment[1,2] and are used in many applications such as drug discovery, toxicity testing and tissue engineering
This study evaluated the use of synthetic hydrogel polymers used to manufacture soft contact lenses to guide cells to form multicellular tissue-like structures
It was found that bovine chondrocytes and porcine dental pulp stem cells were able to form 3D tissue structures when placed inside a soft contact lens

Summary

Introduction

Three dimensional tissue cultures are gaining popularity because they mimic the natural cell environment[1,2] and are used in many applications such as drug discovery, toxicity testing and tissue engineering. There are at least four common methods reported in the literature used to prepare these 3D spherical tissue cultures or multi-cellular tumor spheroids (MCTS) without the need for any scaffolds or matrices They include (a) the use of centrifugal force to produce cell pellets[4], (b) the hanging drop technique[5,6], (c) culturing cells at high density to enable self assembly, or (d) placing cell suspensions onto hydrophilic surfaces (agarose or alginate based hydrogels) so that electrochemical forces coerce cells to assemble into spherical structures[7]. These methods are often time consuming and the results are often poorly reproducible[8]

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